Conventional endoscope reprocessing involves either one of two manual cleaning approaches. In a first approach, a pre-formulated chemical solution is manually poured into an automatic endoscope reprocessor (AER), which is then used to dispense the pre-formulated chemical solution onto the endoscope for cleaning. While such pre-formulated chemical solutions require very little attention, i.e., just pour and go, the use of these pre-formulated chemicals, while generally accepted, have drawbacks. First, these pre-formulated chemical solutions have been proven in years' past to fail to clean endoscopes at a level sufficient to meet standards. Secondly, pre-formulated chemical solutions are typically more expensive than chemicals that require on-site mixing. Finally, and on the other end of the spectrum, these pre-formulated chemical solutions typically have a rather large toxicity, and therefore are dangerous to endoscope reprocessing technicians and possibly even patients.
In view of these shortfalls, a “mix on site” approach to formulating chemical solutions for use in endoscope reprocessing has surfaced and actually proven quite effective not only for meeting health standards, but also with respect to cost. In this approach, a service technician performing the reprocessing will manually mix one or more component concentrates with water in order to formulate a chemical solution on site. Then, the technician pours the formulated chemical solution in an AER for application to the subject endoscopes for reprocessing. While this new approach has obvious advantages over the use of pre-formulated chemical solutions, it does have drawbacks. First, being a manual process, this approach is therefore extremely time consuming. This is especially true if the technician is responsible for reprocessing numerous endoscopes. Secondly, the mixture of many of the component concentrates used to formulate chemical solutions for endoscope reprocessing yields a quite unpleasant and potentially harmful odor, which obviously can have adverse effects on the servicing technicians.